The restless dead: Anxiety, contagion, and the social function of the vampire myth

“ Consciousness, therefore, suffers this violence at its own hands; it destroys its own limited satisfaction. At the feeling of this violence, anxiety for the truth may well withdraw, and struggle to preserve for itself that which is in danger of being lost. But it can find no rest. Should that anxious fearfulness wish to remain always in unthinking indolence, thought will agitate the thoughtlessness, its restlessness will disturb that indolence. ”

“ The only reality is “anxiety” in the whole chain of beings. To the man lost in the world and its diversions this anxiety is a brief, fleeting fear. But if that fear becomes conscious of itself, it becomes anguish, the perpetual climate of the lucid man “in whom existence is concentrated.” ”

“ Among the specialists, the writers upon vampire lore and legend, two definitions may be quoted:—Hurst, who says that: “A vampyr is a dead body which continues to live in the grave; which it leaves, however, by night, for the purpose of sucking the blood of the living, whereby it is nourished and preserved in good condition, instead of becoming decomposed like other dead bodies”; and Scoffern, who wrote: “The best definition I can give of a vampire is a living mischievous and murderous dead body. A living dead body! ”

“ What is a vampire? The definition given in Webster’s International Dictionary is: “A blood-sucking ghost or re-animated body of a dead person; a soul or re-animated body of a dead person believed to come from the grave and wander about by night sucking the blood of persons asleep, causing their death.” ”

“ Whitney’s Century Dictionary says that a vampire is: “A kind of spectral body which, according to a superstition existing among the Slavic and other races on the Lower Danube, leaves the grave during the night and maintains a semblance of life by sucking the warm blood of living men and women while they are asleep. [2] Dead wizards, werwolves, heretics, and other outcasts become vampires, as do also the illegitimate offspring of parents themselves illegitimate, and anyone killed by a vampire.” ”

“ The vampire would have clasped the peasant in his arms, but luckily for him the cocks begin to crow, and the corpse disappears. The next morning, when folks come and look, the old man and the lad are dead.”
According to the Servians and Bulgarians, unclean spirits enter into the corpses of malefactors and other evilly disposed persons, who then become vampires. In some places the jumping of a boy over the corpse is considered as fatal as that of a cat. ”

“ A restless fear and depression of spirits prepared the body for the seeds of disease, and the contagion, which was not perhaps generated in the atmosphere, was carried by it with fearful rapidity. The plague struck down its victims at once in city and in country, and spared no rank nor condition of life. Then all bond of fellowship and of society was loosened, strange crimes and suspicions,—strange even to that land of crime and treachery,—influenced the lives and thoughts of all men. Innocent persons were hunted to death, as poisoners and spreaders of infection ”

“ Many dead bodies have been thus opened and dissected, and it is found that all who have died thus suddenly have had their lungs infected and have spat blood. The contagious nature of the disease is indeed the most terrible of all the terrors (of the time) , for when anyone who is infected by it dies, all who see him in his sickness, or visit him, or do any business with him, or even carry him to the grave, quickly follow him thither, and there is no known means of protection. ”

“ Hence anxiety, which is a continued pain of fear, so universally debilitates the constitution as to occasion a lingering death; which happens much more frequently than is usually supposed; and these victims of continued anxiety are said to die of a broken heart. ”

“ Fear.—Almost in every case, if a person is brought in sudden contact with the remains of one who has died of either cholera, small pox, yellow fever, or any of those terrible epidemic and contagious diseases which will in a few weeks decimate a populous city, the feeling will be one of repulsive horror; in some this feeling will amount to absolute fear, which will show itself in the dilated pupil, the bleached countenance, and the momentous forebodings which assail the mind and predispose the system to the attacks of the disease. ”

“ During an epidemic of a dreaded contagious disease, people who are especially susceptible and full of fear become panic-stricken through the cumulative effect of hearing the subject talked about and discussed on every hand and the vivid pictures which come from reading the newspapers. Their minds (as in the case of yellow fever) become full of images of the disease, of its symptoms—black vomit, delirium,—and of death, mourning, and funerals.
If you never accomplish anything else in life, get rid of worry. There are no greater enemies of harmony than little anxieties and petty cares. ”

“ Evils arising in this source are unknown to the rich. Soldered in its leaden coffin, on tressels in some separate and spacious room, a corpse may await the convenience of survivors with little detriment to their atmosphere.
Not so in the poor man’s dwelling. The sides of a wooden coffin, often imperfectly joined, are at best all that divide the decomposition of the dead from the respiration of the living. A room, tenanted night and day by the family [302] of mourners, likewise contains the remains of the dead. For some days the coffin is unclosed. The bare corpse lies there amid the living ”

“ The condition of the common people (and belike, in great part, of the middle class also) was yet more pitiable to behold, for that these, for the most part retained by hope [11] or poverty in their houses and abiding in their own quarters, sickened by the thousand daily and being altogether untended and unsuccoured, died well nigh all without recourse. Many breathed their last in the open street, whilst other many, for all they died in their houses, made it known to the neighbours that they were dead rather by the stench of their rotting bodies than otherwise; ”

“ It is one chief advantage of extramural sepulture, that, while the inevitable decay of the dead will be removed from the vicinity of the living, and the latter will no longer have their atmosphere tainted by this hideous contamination; so likewise for the dead—however humble, that in this new resting-place, room will be allotted them with no indecent stint; that the dwellings and market-places of the living will no longer hem them in, grudging their narrow requirements ”

“ The true principles for burial of the dead lie rather in recognising their decomposition as inevitable, and in providing only lest it be offensive or injurious to the living. This is best attained by interment in a well-chosen soil, at a depth proportioned to the qualities of the ground; with no pretence of everlasting coffins and impenetrable cerements; but with ample vegetation above, to relieve the upper earth from whatever products of decay may mount and mingle there ”

“ If you had lost any dear one of your friends by the death incident to mortality, you would groan grievously, and weep with disordered countenance, with changed dress, with neglected hair, with clouded face, with dejected appearance, you would show the signs of grief. Miserable creature, you have lost your soul; spiritually dead here, you are continuing to live to yourself, and although yourself walking about, you have begun to carry your own death with you. ”

“ Money which has been the death of so many bodies is every day the death of thousands of souls. More contagious than the rags of a man with the pest, than the pus of an ulcer, than the filth of a sewer, it enters into every house, shines on the counters of the money-changers, settles down in money-chests, profanes the pillow of sleep, hides itself in the fetid darkness of squalid back-rooms, sullies the innocent hands of children, tempts virgins, pays the hangman for his work, goes about on the face of the earth to stir up hatred, to set cupidity on fire, to hasten corruption and death. ”

“ Anxiety for self, and the fear of contagion, had worked so deeply on the mind of the multitude, that many persons abandoned even their near relatives and friends when they were attacked by the plague. Nothing but the charity which is of divine not of natural origin could meet such an emergency, or cope in any degree with the awful misery of those days. Francesca, bereaved of every thing but her one little girl, and lodged with Vannozza and Rita in a corner of their dismantled house, had no longer at her command the resources she had formerly possessed for the relief of the poor. ”

“ It is held that so long as the astral form is not entirely separated from the body there is a liability that it may be forced by magnetic attraction to re-enter it. Sometimes it will be only half-way out when the corpse, which presents the appearance of death, is buried. In such cases the astral body voluntarily re-enters the mortal frame, and then one of two things happens—either the unhappy victim will writhe in the agonising torture of suffocation, or if he has been grossly material he becomes a vampire. ”

“ According to primitive ideas, blood is life, and to receive blood is to receive life: the soul of the dead wants to live, and, consequently, loves blood. The shades in Hades are eager to drink the blood of Odysseus’s sacrifice, that their life may be renewed for a time. It is of the greatest importance that the soul should get what it desires, as, if not satisfied, it might come and attack the living. It is possible that the bodily mutilations which to this day accompany funerals among some peoples have their origin in the belief that the departed spirit is refreshed by the blood thus spilt. ”

“ The belief in the vampire and ghoul was prevalent even in Babylon and Assyria, where it was maintained that the dead could appear again upon earth and seek sustenance from the living. The belief is, in all probability, linked up with the almost universal theory that transfused blood is necessary for revivification. Baths of human blood were anciently prescribed as a possible remedy for leprosy. ”

“ This primitive conception of the persistence of a latent life in the cold and rigid corpse or of its passage to a vaporous being like the body, is connected with the belief that the dead retain all the needs and feelings which were previously theirs. The funeral cult, celebrated at the tomb, is born of this belief. It proceeds from fear as much as from piety, for the dead are prone to resentment and quick in vengeance. ”

“ In very obstinate cases it is further recommended to cut off the head, fill the mouth with garlic, and then replace the head in its proper place in the coffin; or else to extract the heart and burn it, and strew the ashes over the grave.
The murony of the Wallachians not only sucks blood, but also possesses the power of assuming a variety of shapes, as, for instance, those of a cat, dog, flea, or spider; in consequence of which the ordinary evidence of death caused by the attack of a vampire, viz. the mark of a bite in the back of the neck, is not considered indispensable. ”

“ And by this means it comes to pass, that the fear of death does in some circumstances, particularly where the nervous system is, through a bodily disorder, reduced to an aptness to receive uneasy and disgustful vibrations, only or chiefly, being in a state of irritability approaching to pains, grow to a most enormous size, collecting and uniting every disagreeable idea and impression under the associations belonging to death; so that such persons live in perpetual anxiety and slavery to the fear of death. ”